FA Women's National League Explained: Tiers Three and Four
The FA Women's National League explained for readers in England: six divisions at tiers three and four, promotion to WSL2, the Cup, the Plate and its history.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Women's Football24 min read
- Clubs
- 72
- Divisions
- 6
- League games per club
- 22
- Founded
- 1991
Seventy-two clubs, six divisions of twelve, twenty-two league matches each, and nearly all of it played at two o'clock on a Sunday. That is the FA Women's National League. It occupies tiers three and four of women's football in England, directly beneath the Women's Super League and WSL2, and it is the highest level of the game still administered by the Football Association itself.
Tier three is two divisions, the Northern Premier and the Southern Premier, whose champions are promoted to WSL2. Tier four is Division One, split four ways into North, Midlands, South East and South West. The league is not professional: a handful of clubs pay wages, most pay expenses or nothing, and the best of its players train in the evening after a day's work. It was founded in 1991, spent two decades as the top flight of the English game and has carried its present name since 2018.
What the league is and where it sits in the English pyramid
The acronym is FAWNL. Its six divisions are identical in size and format, which makes the structure easy to hold in the head.
| Division | Tier | Clubs | Champion's reward |
|---|---|---|---|
| Northern Premier Division | 3 | 12 | Promotion to WSL2, subject to licence |
| Southern Premier Division | 3 | 12 | Promotion to WSL2, subject to licence |
| Division One North | 4 | 12 | Promotion to a Premier Division |
| Division One Midlands | 4 | 12 | Promotion to a Premier Division |
| Division One South East | 4 | 12 | Promotion to a Premier Division |
| Division One South West | 4 | 12 | Promotion to a Premier Division |
Above it are the twenty-six clubs of the professional game, in two national divisions run by a company those clubs own. Below it are the eight regional leagues, whose Premier Divisions are tier five. The league is therefore the hinge of the whole system: every club that reaches professional football by results has to come through one of its two Premier Divisions, and every club that falls out of the professional game lands in one. The complete ladder from county football upwards is set out in our tier-by-tier guide to the women's pyramid.
- 72Clubs
- 6Divisions
- 12Clubs per division
- 22League matches per club
The league's fixed format under its current rules. Membership of individual divisions changes every summer; these totals do not.
Three points for a win and one for a draw, with clubs level on points separated by goal difference. Nothing exotic. The interest is in who the clubs are. A single division can contain the women's section of a Premier League club with a Category One academy behind it, a ninety-year-old non-league club that added a women's team in 2019, and an independent women's club that has never been attached to anybody.
The naming takes a moment to get used to. "Premier Division" here means tier three of the women's pyramid, not the top of anything, and "Division One" means tier four. The Premier label was attached to the two tier-three divisions in the 2018 renaming, an echo of the title the whole competition had just given up.
The Northern Premier and Southern Premier: tier three and a line that moves
Twenty-four clubs play at tier three, and where each of them plays is decided by a line the league draws afresh every summer.
There is no fixed boundary on a map. Once promotion and relegation have settled the twenty-four names, the league divides them into a northern twelve and a southern twelve on geography, and the clubs in the middle of the country go wherever the numbers require. If two southern clubs come down from WSL2 and two northern clubs go up, the line shifts north and a Midlands side that spent last season travelling to Tyneside finds itself going to Devon instead. Clubs from Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire have generally been northern. Clubs from Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire have generally been southern. Nobody in between can rely on it.
The Southern Premier is the longer division from end to end. Its span has run from Plymouth in the west to Ipswich and the Essex coast in the east, and for many years it included a club from across the Severn: Cardiff City Ladies, renamed Gwalia United in 2024, played in the English system and not the Welsh one. The Northern Premier is more compact on paper, but a trip between the North East and the West Midlands is still a coach booked for seven in the morning.
Why the split matters more than it looks
Two divisions at the same tier are never exactly the same strength, and for most of the league's modern history only one promotion place was available between them. That made the allocation line a competitive question as well as a logistical one. A strong club moved into the other half could change both title races at a stroke. Since both champions began going up in 2023-24 the stakes have been lower, though clubs still watch the announcement closely for the fuel bill alone.
The four Division One sections and how clubs are allocated to them
Tier four is the widest level of the league: forty-eight clubs in four sections.
Division One North takes in the North East, the North West and most of Yorkshire. Division One Midlands covers the West and East Midlands and whatever fringe territory is needed to make twelve. Division One South East runs from East Anglia through London to Kent and Sussex. Division One South West stretches from Cornwall to Hampshire and the Thames Valley and is, for the clubs at its extremities, the most expensive of the four to play in.
Allocation follows the same logic as the tier above. The eight regional champions coming up are placed by location, the clubs relegated from the Premier Divisions are slotted in beneath the half they came from, and the boundaries flex to keep each section at twelve. In the usual pattern the North section receives the champions of the two northern regional leagues, the Midlands section the champions of the West Midlands and East Midlands leagues, the South East section those of the Eastern and the London and South East leagues, and the South West section those of the Southern and South West leagues. Usual, not guaranteed. A champion from the top of the Eastern region can be sent to the Midlands, and a Yorkshire club has more than once been asked to play there too.
The character of tier four differs from tier three in a way the table does not show. Third-tier clubs have mostly made a decision about what they want to be. Fourth-tier clubs are often still finding out. Some are on the way up with a men's club's backing and will be gone in two seasons. Others have been at this level, under one name or another, since the divisions were regional Combination Leagues in the 1990s.
How promotion to WSL2 is won
Win a Premier Division and hold the licence. Those are the two conditions, and the second catches clubs out more often than outsiders expect.
On the sporting side the rule is now simple. The champions of the Northern Premier and the champions of the Southern Premier are both promoted to WSL2, replacing the two clubs relegated from it. It was not always so generous. From 2014-15, when promotion out of the league into the second tier first became possible, until 2022-23 there was one place, and the two champions met in a single play-off on neutral ground to decide who took it. Sheffield FC won the first of those matches in 2015. The losing champion had won a twenty-two game league and stayed exactly where it was.
The third place in 2025-26 was a one-off. The WSL's expansion to fourteen clubs pulled an extra club up through each level, and to keep the divisions below at twelve the FA added a play-off between the two Premier Division runners-up. Similar matches between Division One runners-up filled the gaps a tier lower.
| Season | Northern champions | Southern champions | Promoted |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-18 | Blackburn Rovers | Charlton Athletic | Charlton, by play-off |
| 2018-19 | Blackburn Rovers | Coventry United | Both, as the tier above expanded |
| 2021-22 | Wolverhampton Wanderers | Southampton | Southampton, by play-off |
| 2022-23 | Nottingham Forest | Watford | Watford, by play-off |
| 2023-24 | Newcastle United | Portsmouth | Both |
| 2024-25 | Nottingham Forest | Ipswich Town | Both |
| 2025-26 | Burnley | Watford | Both, plus Wolverhampton Wanderers by the runners-up play-off |
The licence a champion must still satisfy
WSL2 is a licensed league. A club coming up has to meet criteria covering its ground, its training facilities, medical cover, coaching qualifications, the hours for which its players are engaged and the money behind all of it. The application is made during the season, long before the title is decided, and a club that has not applied cannot be promoted however many points it wins.
That is not a hypothetical. In the spring of 2025 Wolverhampton Wanderers went into the final day of the Northern Premier season still able to finish top, and it then emerged that the club had not submitted an application for the tier above. The players said so publicly and with some force. A year later Wolves were in the second tier after all, having finished runners-up to Burnley and beaten Plymouth Argyle 1-0 in the additional play-off at Burton Albion's Pirelli Stadium in May 2026.
The episode shows where the real decision about promotion is taken. It is taken in a boardroom in the winter, when the owner decides whether to commit to the cost of a professional operation, and the squad finds out afterwards. What the licence involves on the far side of that decision is described in how promotion to the WSL works.
Movement inside the league and the drop to tier five
Each of the six divisions relegates its bottom two clubs. That one sentence generates most of the summer's movement.
- Premier Division championsPromoted to WSL2, provided the club has applied for and been granted the professional licence.
- Premier Division bottom twoRelegated to whichever Division One section suits the club's location.
- Division One championsThe four section winners are promoted to tier three and placed north or south of that season's line.
- Division One bottom twoEight clubs in all are relegated to the Premier Divisions of their regional leagues at tier five.
- Regional Premier championsThe eight regional winners come up to tier four if their grounds meet the National League's criteria.
The standard movements between divisions. In 2025-26 additional play-offs between runners-up were staged to fill extra places, and each season's rules say whether any are being used.
Four clubs come down from tier three and four go up. Eight leave the bottom of tier four and eight regional champions replace them. The arithmetic balances only if every promoted club is eligible and willing, and it frequently is not that neat. A regional champion whose ground falls short, or whose committee decides the travel is beyond it, can be passed over for the next eligible club, and a club that resigns from the league in June leaves a vacancy that is filled by reprieving a relegated side. Reprieves are common enough that finishing eleventh is not always the end.
The expansion season added a wrinkle at this level too. In 2025-26 the runners-up of Division One North and Division One Midlands met in a play-off for an additional promotion place, and the runners-up of the South East and South West sections did the same. Boldmere St. Michaels beat Cheadle Town Stingers 3-0 in the first, and Norwich City got past Moneyfields on penalties after a 2-2 draw in the second, both at the Pirelli Stadium. Six clubs went up from tier four that year where four normally do. The matches were single ties, brought in to solve the problem expansion created, and whether a runners-up play-off is retained is something each season's rules settle.
A club that withdraws during a season creates a different kind of mess. Its results are removed from the table, every other club loses the points it took from those fixtures, and a division of twelve finishes as a division of eleven with twenty matches each. It has happened more than once at tier four, usually over the winter.
Relegation from tier four is a bigger step than it sounds. A club leaves a competition with central administration, appointed match officials at a set level and a place in a national cup, and returns to a league run by regional volunteers. Recruitment suffers first. Players who joined for National League football have other National League clubs within driving distance, and no contract stops them leaving.
Then there is the traffic from above. Clubs relegated from WSL2 arrive at tier three with a professional cost base and, usually, eight weeks to dismantle it. Clubs that resign a professional licence can be placed lower still, wherever the FA judges appropriate. For Reading in 2024 that meant a regional league at tier five; for Blackburn Rovers a year later it meant Division One North.
What semi-professional means at this level
It means almost anything short of a full-time job, and the league's rules do not try to narrow it.
| Typical National League club | WSL2 club | |
|---|---|---|
| Players' status | Amateur, expenses or part-time contract | Professional contract required by licence |
| Training | Two or three evenings a week | Daytime, most days |
| Matchday | Sunday, two o'clock | Weekend, varied for broadcast |
| Staff | Mostly part-time or volunteer | Salaried coaching and medical team |
| Entry test | Ground and administrative criteria | Full licence with financial assessment |
At the well-funded end of tier three a player may have a part-time contract, a gym programme, a physiotherapist at training and a strength coach borrowed from the men's academy. At a mid-table fourth-tier club she may receive petrol money, or nothing, and pay a monthly subscription that covers pitch hire. The phrase "semi-professional" is stretched across both.
What they share is the timetable. Training happens between seven and nine in the evening because that is when the players and the floodlit pitch are both free. Away games mean leaving at dawn on a Sunday and getting home for work on Monday. Players at this level are teachers, students, police officers, personal trainers and, quite often, coaches in the club's own girls' section on the other nights of the week.
Newcastle United broke the pattern in 2023 by putting their squad on full-time contracts as a third-tier club, and won the Northern Premier that season. The rules allowed it. They also allowed every other club in the division to wonder aloud what the point of the fixture was. That tension, between clubs treating tier three as a staging post and clubs for whom it is the summit, runs through most of the league's present-day arguments.
Young players complicate the picture usefully. Professional clubs place academy players with National League sides through dual registration and loans, so a teenager on a WSL club's books can spend a season playing senior football at tier three on a Sunday. For many of them it is the most valuable year of their development, and the club that hosts them gets a player it could never have recruited.
Behind all of this sits a distinction English football makes everywhere beneath the professional game. A registered player is either a contract player, with written terms and a wage, or a non-contract player, who may receive expenses and is free to leave at short notice. Most National League squads are a mix of the two, weighted heavily towards the second, and that is why a strong side can lose three starters in a fortnight when a better-funded neighbour comes calling.
Ground, floodlight and medical criteria a club must meet
A club holds its place in the league by results and by meeting a set of off-field standards written into the rules. The precise measurements are revised from time to time and belong in the current rulebook; the shape of them is stable.
The ground
The league expects a proper football ground, not a roped-off pitch in a park. That means a playing surface of regulation size that the club has secured for the whole season, a barrier around it, separate changing rooms for both teams and for the match officials, cover for spectators and somewhere to take admission money. The requirements step up between Division One and the Premier Division. Artificial pitches of an approved standard are permitted and widely used, because one all-weather surface can carry a first team, a reserve side and a junior section without cutting up in January.
Very few clubs own what they play on. The typical arrangement is a groundshare with a men's non-league club, formalised in an agreement the league can inspect, and security of tenure is what the criteria are really probing. A women's team that can be moved off the pitch whenever the landlord's first team has a replay does not have a home ground in the sense the rules mean.
Floodlights
Lights matter for a practical reason. A postponed Sunday fixture has to be replayed, and the only free dates are midweek evenings. A club without floodlights of the required standard has nowhere to put those games between October and March, so the rules treat lighting as part of fulfilling fixtures and not as a comfort for spectators.
Medical cover
Every matchday requires a qualified person on the bench to deal with injuries, with the level of qualification rising with the tier, and the home club is responsible for emergency equipment and access. Given how much attention the women's game has paid to knee ligament injuries in the past decade, this is the criterion on which the gap between a resourced club and a struggling one is most visible from the touchline.
Failure to meet the criteria has consequences on a sliding scale: a deadline, then a fine, and in the last resort relegation or a refused promotion. In practice the league works with clubs for some time before it reaches for the last of those.
The National League Cup and the Plate
The league has had its own knockout cup since its first season. Arsenal won the first final in 1992, beating Millwall Lionesses 1-0, and for twenty years, as the Premier League Cup, it was one of the three major domestic trophies in the English women's game. It is now a competition for third and fourth-tier clubs only.
The Plate arrived in 2014-15, and with it the determining round that defined the competition for a decade. Every club in the league was drawn into one opening round. The winners carried on in the Cup. The losers went into the Plate, a full knockout competition of its own with a final at a neutral ground; Preston North End won the first, beating Huddersfield Town 3-0 at Guiseley in 2015. Nobody was eliminated on the first weekend, and a club beaten in September could still lift silverware in the spring.
The 2025-26 season replaced that opening round with a group stage. Eighty-eight teams were drawn into twenty-two groups of four and played each other once, and for the first time the field included academy sides from the professional clubs. The twenty-two group winners and the ten best runners-up went into the Cup knockout rounds; the other twelve runners-up and the twenty best third-placed sides went into the Plate. The principle survived the redesign: an early stage sorts the entry into two tiers, and each then plays to a final.
It is a sensible piece of design for a league of this kind. With one knockout cup, a fourth-tier club drawn away to a full-time third-tier side would have a season's cup football that lasted ninety minutes. The Plate gives the weaker half of the draw something winnable. Whether academy teams belong in the senior competition is a separate question, and a contested one among member clubs.
The Cup final has become the league's showpiece day, played in recent seasons at EFL grounds: Kenilworth Road in Luton in 2024, the Bescot Stadium in Walsall in 2025 and Loftus Road in west London in 2026. The cup for the two professional tiers above is a different competition altogether, explained in our guide to the Women's League Cup.
Who runs it: an FA league with its own committee
The Women's Super League and WSL2 left the FA in 2024 for a company owned by their clubs. The National League stayed behind, and that defines its position: it is the top of the part of the pyramid the governing body still operates directly.
Day-to-day administration is carried out by FA staff. Policy is steered by a league management committee with an elected chair, on which member clubs are represented, and rule changes go to the clubs at a general meeting before being submitted to the FA for sanction. Discipline for on-field offences follows the FA's regulations, exactly as it does across English football. Referees and assistants are appointed centrally from the FA's lists, which is one of the things a club gains on promotion from a regional league, where officials are found locally and an assistant referee can be whoever is available.
What a member club receives from the centre is mostly organisation: a fixture list, registered officials, a registration system, a cup competition, a disciplinary process and a rulebook that is enforced. What it does not receive is money in any quantity that would change its budget.
The contrast with the tier above is sharper than the single step suggests. WSL Football sells its own broadcast and sponsorship rights, distributes the proceeds to its shareholders and sets its own strategy. The National League has no shareholders. It has a title sponsor when one can be found, modest central income, and member clubs that fund themselves. Its officials are in the awkward position of running a competition whose most ambitious members want to leave it as quickly as possible for a body they will then part-own.
There is a fair argument that this arrangement leaves tiers three and four underpowered. The clubs at the top of the Northern and Southern Premier are closer in budget and outlook to WSL2 than to Division One, and the question of whether tier three should eventually pass to the professional leagues' company has been asked openly. For now the boundary sits where it was drawn in 2024.
The shape of a season: twenty-two games and Sunday afternoons
A National League season starts in August and ends in late April or early May, and it has a rhythm that regulars could set a calendar by.
League fixtures occupy Sundays at two o'clock. The cup group games and early rounds take some autumn weekends. The Women's FA Cup takes others: under the entry points used in 2025-26, fourth-tier clubs joined at the third qualifying round in the autumn and third-tier clubs at the first round proper. A good draw there is the nearest thing a National League club has to a windfall, as our Women's FA Cup guide explains, because a tie against a WSL side in the fourth round brings a crowd, a stream and prize money that no league fixture can.
Then winter intervenes. Twenty-two games in nine months looks spacious until December, when waterlogged grass pitches and frozen artificial ones start removing fixtures. By March a club with a cup run behind it may have six league games in hand and four Wednesdays to play them on. Title races at this level are regularly decided by which contender has the deeper squad for a run of three matches in eight days, with players coming straight from work.
County cups fill what gaps remain. National League clubs still enter the senior women's cup of their County FA, where they are usually the strongest side in the draw, and a county final in April is often the one piece of silverware a mid-table tier-four club can realistically win. Some treat it as a nuisance. Most do not, because a trophy presented at the county ground in front of the club's junior teams does more for recruitment than a sixth-place finish.
Crowds are counted in dozens at the bottom of tier four and in hundreds at the top of tier three, with the occasional four-figure gate when a professional club opens its main stadium for a title decider. Admission is a few pounds. The football is quicker and more direct than a visitor used to the WSL might expect, and the standard at the top of the Premier Divisions has risen sharply since both champions began going up.
From top flight to third tier: 1991 to the present name
The league now at tiers three and four was, for twenty years, the summit of the English game. Its history is one of a competition being demoted without ever being relegated.
| Year | What changed |
|---|---|
| 1991 | The Women's Football Association launches the Women's National League: 24 clubs in a National Division and Northern and Southern Divisions |
| 1994 | The FA takes over and renames it the FA Women's Premier League |
| 2011 | The Women's Super League is placed above it; the National Division becomes tier two |
| 2013 | The National Division is played for the last time |
| 2014 | Northern and Southern Divisions become tier three; four Combination Leagues are absorbed as Division One; the Plate is added |
| 2015 | First promotion from the league into the second tier, by play-off |
| 2018 | Renamed the FA Women's National League |
| 2023 | Both Premier Division champions promoted for the first time by rule |
Doncaster Belles won the first title in 1991-92 without dropping a point. The National Division then belonged to Arsenal for most of its existence, and their 2006-07 side won it as part of a clean sweep that included the European Cup of the day.
The Premier League years were amateur football played to a high standard by people with other jobs. England internationals trained two evenings a week and paid their own way to matches. Beneath the National Division sat the Northern and Southern Divisions, with promotion and relegation between them, and from 1998 four regional Combination Leagues formed a level below that. Croydon won three titles before the club was absorbed by Charlton Athletic in 2000. Everton took one in 1998. Fulham's came in 2003, at the end of a brief experiment in full-time professionalism that the club abandoned soon afterwards. Around those interruptions Arsenal won the rest.
The last three of those titles went to Sunderland, after the leading clubs had left for the Super League, and brought no promotion because none was on offer. The wider story of the amateur decades and what followed is told in our history of when women's football became professional.
The 2018 renaming looked cosmetic and was in fact a tidying-up. A competition called the Premier League sitting beneath two others had become confusing, and the FA used the relicensing of the top two tiers to give the third and fourth a name that described them. It happened to be the name the league was born with.
Clubs that used it as a springboard, and familiar names that stayed
Look at the professional tiers in any recent season and count the clubs that were in this league within the previous decade. The number is high.
Brighton and Hove Albion won the Southern Division and the play-off in 2016. Tottenham Hotspur did the same a year later and were in the WSL by 2019. West Ham United were a third-tier club in 2017-18 and a top-flight one the following season, lifted two levels by the licensing round. Leicester City and Crystal Palace both left tier three by the same 2018 process and later reached the WSL as second-tier champions. Charlton Athletic won the last play-off of the Premier League era. More recently Southampton, Newcastle United, Portsmouth, Nottingham Forest, Ipswich Town and Burnley have all gone up as champions.
The pattern in that list is hard to miss. Nearly every club on it is the women's team of a men's club in the Premier League or the EFL. Independent clubs have won National League divisions, and Sheffield FC and Coventry United both took promotion, but sustaining a place above has proved a different matter. The league works as a springboard chiefly for clubs that bring their own trampoline.
Then there are the names that have spent long stretches here. Leeds United, Derby County, Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion, Huddersfield Town, Middlesbrough, Oxford United, Norwich City and Plymouth Argyle have all been National League clubs for years at a time, some of them with women's sections far older than the professional era. Fulham, who in 2000 became the first full-time professional women's team in England and won the national title three years later, spent recent seasons at tiers five and four before winning Division One South East in 2025-26. Doncaster Rovers Belles, the first champions, were in Division One within a year of giving up their second-tier place in 2018.
For supporters of those clubs the league is no waiting room. It is where the women's team plays, in front of a few hundred people who know the squad by first name, and it has been that for longer than the divisions above it have existed.
Further guides to the English game are collected on the England hub, and the site's wider football coverage is in the football section.